Every moment of light and dark is a miracle.

Moving

You would think that with having no furniture and only having the luggage we brought that moving would be easy. Ha!

The first apartment we stayed at in Taiwan (in Tainan) was for a duration of 3 weeks. We wanted to stay in a part of the country we were not familiar with. Tainan was fun, and we were a little sad when it came time to leave, but mostly I was surprised at how our relatively small amount of belongings had spread across the entire apartment.

We only have 2 carryons each and then 3 more suitcases that were checked. One bag was technology that my husband and daughters could not live without (that means videogame consoles and the millions of cords that come with them). Bag 2 was toothbrushes, toothpaste, essential oils, first aid, brushes, hair stuff, shampoo, etc. The third and final “big suitcase” was solely school supplies. Not like pens and pencils, although there were a few, but games and curriculum items that we could not live without. It turns out we can live without a lot of this, because our digital curriculum is doing its job, but it’s not a proper trip unless you overpack. Anyway, it took longer than expected to retrieve our far-flung possessions. Once packed, we had to get the 8 backpacks, 8 small suitcases, 3 big suitcases, 2 strollers and 8 people into the elevator and down the stairs, to wait for the taxis.

We were headed to Taichung which happens to be almost 2 hours from Tainan. We could

A) take a taxi to the train station and then get the aforementioned luggage and people out of the cab into the train station, to the ticket booth and then onto the train. Once in Taichung, we could remove all of our stuff and people from the train, go through the train station, find two taxis, load the taxis, drive to our new apartment and then unload for the last time.

OR

B) We could load our stuff into two taxis and have them take us to Taichung and drop us at the apartment.

Clearly we went with B. When you have 8 people, the cost of trains and busses really add up and sometimes it can be the same amount just to take taxis. In this case, the taxi option was a little more expensive, but it was totally worth it!

Imagine all 8 of us and our luggage and strollers in the lobby of an apartment building waiting for the landlord to show up and let us in. Like everything else we do in Taiwan we were hardly inconspicuous. I can’t even imagine what the residents thought as they came and went.

Once in the apartment it’s just clean, clean, clean. They don’t really clean when they move out here, you clean when you move in. It’s gross, but necessary. In more expensive apartment complexes, they clean them or you can have someone come in and clean, but we weren’t going for expensive. We really like the apartment and now that it is cleaner and our possessions are everywhere, it is starting to feel like home.

We had no internet when we moved in, for almost a week. I was worried about this, but it turns out I don’t use the internet a lot so it didn’t affect me as much as I thought it would. The only problem I had was when we were learning and I wanted to quickly look something up, other than that it was really not a big deal. Our curriculum is digital content that is downloaded and the babies’ reading videos are DVDs. The girls couldn’t have their weekly TV day, but surprisingly they all survived.

It is so nice to have a home base. We signed a year contract for the apartment and our plan is to travel to other parts of Asia every once in a while and come back to Taiwan in between.